What is a "rare" ligature?

If you open the Typography panel from the font panel, you may notice that some fonts have both "Common Ligatures" and "Rare Ligatures". What is that supposed to mean? Is it not up to the user to chose what s/he thinks is rare or common?

There is no strict border between common and rare ligatures. The base assumption is that a common ligature is a ligature that is natural and can be applied without disturbing the text. Take the ligature fi mixing f and i. You can usually apply it whenever an f and and i meet. Most readers will hardly notice, but the text becomes more pleasing to the eye. Common ligatures are usually switched on by default. Common ligature very often start by the letter f. Some good candidates for common ligatures are ff, fl, ffi, fi, ffl, fb, fk and fh.

A "rare" ligature, however, goes out of its way to be noticed. It is usually pleasing to the eye, but at the same time it is so obvious that it disturbes the reading. They should usually not be applied to body text, but they can be applied to headers and titles. The most common "rare" ligature is probably st for s and t. But there are many others. Apple Chancery has rare ligatures for the letter combinations ot, et, sp, ss and es, just to mention a few. Big Caslon and Hoefler Text and many Adobe fonts provide rare ligatures for ct.

Overuse of rare ligatures in Apple Chancery.

The recommendation is to leave the default - common ligatures on, rare ligatures off, unless you find a really good reason to change it.

More information for ligature enthusiasts.

Why are some glyphs missing in Pages?

Glyphs are variants of characters in a font. One example is "fi", which in some fonts may use special glyphs to look like "fi". (Increase the text size in your browser, if you cannot tell the difference.) Sometimes glyphs are used to make superscripts like ² instead of 2. Sometimes, but not always, what you achieve with a glyph could also be achieved with standard unicode characters.

In a standard MacOS X application, you access glyph variants like Ligatures and other variants from the Font Palette's Typography option.



Each font can contain a large number of glyph variants or no variants at all. You can see exactly which glyphs are available in a font using the Character Palette.



There are of course different ways of handling glyphs in different kinds of fonts. Adobe and Microsoft use mainly OpenType fonts. Apple uses mainly TrueType fonts. OpenType fonts mostly work in MacOS X, but there may be some glyphs that MacOS X does not support.




For example, if you have Adobe InDesign, you can see a section of "Ornaments" glyphs in the OpenType font Adobe Caslon Pro. The selected pointed hand in the picture above is actually a "P" - something you can tell by copying it and pasting it to another application. You can also see that the unicode for the hand is 0050, and that is upper case P.

You can also see that the GID (Glyph ID) in Adobe's InDesign is 642. However Apple's Character Palette gives it GID 523. Clearly, something strange is going on.

If you access the Typography Palette for Adobe Caslon Pro in TextEdit, you do not have any Ornaments section. However, you can still double click the glyph in the Character Palette and display it in TextEdit.

In Pages you cannot even add it by double clicking it in the Character Palette, when you are running Mac OS X 10.4.

And why? Well, because it is an unsupported feature. It may not be a very exhaustive explanation, but that all there is right now.

How come I cannot use Italics and Bold in some fonts?

The first thing you do is to log feedback, pointing out that you are one of thousands of thousands of users who have problems with this, because Apple does not provide proper feedback in the user interface.

The second thing you do is to read the following paragraphs with an explanation:

Only some fonts contain italic (or oblique) typefaces. A program like MS Word tries to italicize those fonts anyhow, and the result is often not that pretty:



In the picture from Microsoft Word 2004 above, the font Baskerville has an italic typeface. The font Baskerville Old Face does not. The normal versions look almost identical, but the italics look completely different. It is of course possible that you prefer the automatic italics of Baskerville Old Face, but a lot of people probably prefer the elaborate dedicated italics typeface of Baskerville.

To avoid automatically generated italics, Pages and TextEdit and a whole lot of other programs simply do not display italics, when none are available, even if the user asks for it:



In the example using Pages above, the solution is simply to use Baskerville instead of Baskerville Old Face. Here we happened to be lucky, as there was an almost identical font with an italic typeface. It may not be that easy for other fonts, but the Font palette shows which fonts contain Italics.




Comparing the samples from Microsoft Word and Pages higher up on the page, you can also see that Word 2004 is unable to render the ligature fi in any of the samples. Pages handles it well in Baskerville, but fails in Baskerville Old Face, as that font does not contain this feature.